Lunch could wait. Brent Barney '93 had a more important mission to accomplish at the moment than refueling his body. He was on a fishing expedition for feedstock for an alternative transportation fuel. Outside the hotel where the international Renewable Energy: Solar Fuels conference was being held, primordial plant life greened and greased the pumped-in water of a goldfish pond. Barney had already collected algae samples at the beach and from natural and manmade ponds in public parks and front yards. Everywhere he goes, he carries specimen bottles for this purpose.

More than 100 scientists had congregated in Ventura, California, to hear the latest findings in theoretical and applied research. Texaco and Exxon Mobil were there; the Germans and Mexicans, Los Alamos, Cal Tech, Berkeley, Oxford and MIT. Sixty miles to the southeast, the thunder of stampeding pre-rush hour traffic rattled windows in Los Angeles.

Much closer to home, up Logan Canyon, Barney and his USU colleagues have collected algae samples from Tony Grove Lake, the lowland marshes, and numerous other bodies of water tinted tell-tale green.

Under the right temperature, lighting and moisture conditions, the green slime can annually produce up to 10,000 gallons of oil per acre and be grown virtually anywhere. The more sunshine, the better, like that which is found in Southern Utah, for instance, or the Sonoran desert that straddles Mexico and Arizona. If every corn and soybean field in America were dedicated to fuel production instead of food production, the yield would accommodate a fraction of demand, and grocery prices would inflate to intolerable levels. Algaculture, on the other hand, with 12 percent of the Sonoran desert, has the potential of fueling every diesel engine on the planet without adding a single molecule of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Cultivated in solar-powered bioreactors, like the ones developed by USU scientists, the plants could be fed a carefully controlled diet of unwanted carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, industrial factories, and livestock and human waste.

Brett Barney is a recent addition to the team of USU biochemists, food scientists and engineers who are investigating algae and other biofuel feedstocks that could wean us off the greenhouse-gas-emitting petroleum fuel primarily responsible for red alert days on the Wasatch Front and in Cache Valley.

Utah's governor and legislature think the USU research is so promising, they have invested $6 million over five years through their USTAR economic development initiative.

"Finding a secure, clean, sustainable energy supply is perhaps the most significant scientific and technological challenge of the 21st century," says USU biochemist Lance Seefeldt, one of eight professors in four colleges serving on the university's biofuels research team. "There is no clear answer, no one answer. That means we need to do more research."  more